For as much as we try to ignore and segregate it from our daily surfing, the fact remains that porn is the life-blood of the Internet. But how much sexy sex is actually moving through the series of tubes?

The answer is: tons. The world's top porn sites—XVideos, LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8, Pornhub—are on par with Google and Facebook. XVideos alone averages 4.4 billion page views per month, double what Reddit pulls over the same time and triple what CNN can do. And it's not just the amount of traffic that these sites generate, it's the length of individual visits as well. Most sites, Gizmodo included, average three to six minutes per visit. Porn sites average five times that—15-20 minutes per visit.

In terms of actual data usage, porn sites are behemoths. Most sites average 50 - 200 TB of material, which individually really isn't all that much. But during peak times, when the site's loading image galleries, downloading content and streaming video, its data usage soars. According to ExtremeTech,

YouPorn hosts "over 100TB of porn", and serves "over 100 million" page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month.

It gets better! At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.

That's one, single site—and not even the largest of its king—driving 800Gbps. And given that there are more porn sites than there are stars in the sky, it's obvious what we're all really here for—and it ain't for the articles. [ExtremeTech]